Garden to Market- Helping the poor to grow food!

Our chooks have been very busy laying lots of eggs and we have been receiving up to 70 per day!!! We use these eggs to both sell and feed the poor. The young man caring for the chickens is a youth who is recovering from drug addiction. This new responsibility is giving him something meaningful to do whilst also rewarding him with a small income. The road to recovery is long, but he and the chickens are making great progress.

During the evening the chickens are enclosed in a pen to keep them safe and during the day they are allowed to roam around freely. This makes finding and collecting the eggs a little trickier but a happy chook is a healthy one!

Our mushroom project has a new grower wo has recently been rescued from a very violent situation. With no education or income, she felt trapped, unable to flee. The police intervened and now she has a safe place to stay and learning a new set of skills. She is thrilled to participate in the project and is also very happy with the income she is generating too. For her, growing mushrooms is a life changing event!

Our main gardener is still going strong and she loves to take these new people under her wing and teach them. She was also an alcoholic a few years ago, and now is the head gardener.

All of the people in our project keep the money they get from selling their produce. If the foundation would like to use it to feed the poor, we also pay the grower. In this way they see progress immediately which helps restore purpose, worth and self-esteem are essential for starting the healing journey.

This month we also had the opportunity to have 90 international school children over 3 days to see our program and lend a helping hand. Our growers were the teachers and they did an excellent job.

We also grow flowering plants and garden plants which are available for sale.

Links:

• Hand to Hand Foundation

Our Garden to market project is so much more than just growing food and raising chickens to eat and sell. The people in our project have had very little access to educational opportunities which makes it very difficult to find employment and they mostly end up in a cycle of no income, no food and very poor self-esteem. Teaching the participants in the project how to grow food or raise chickens is a great start in skills training but also ignites an awareness inside that they can learn, they can be successful and they can make a difference in the lives of them and their families. Very quickly they can be earning an income and the negative cycle above is transformed into a positive cycle leading to wanting to learn and achieve more.

The participants are able to keep 100% of the money from the produce they grow and sell and the Hand to Hand foundation covers the growing costs. The road to independently covering growing costs and making a profit is a long one. Our aim is to grow hope for the future as well as food.

Waan is a lady who came to us a few years ago and she is now thriving in our program. When she arrived, she had list most of her teeth due to a lifetime of poverty and malnutrition. Unable to chew, she also had severe gastric issues. With no education she had no money and no hope. Now she has a full set of false teeth, we pay her to train others and she is learning to read and write. Waan is just one of many whose life has been transformed by this simple project.

Thank you for your support. Every bit counts!